A Glancing Light

stood at the open door, smiling. 'Something tells me maybe I just ought to leave it to you.'

'Tante grazie, dottore,' Antuono said dryly. 'Grazie infinite!'

With my fingers on the door handle, I paused. 'Colonel, I'd like to propose something. You told me once before that you think the Mafia is behind the thefts.'

'The Sicilian Mafia, yes,' he said warily.

'Well, I'll be going to Sicily this weekend—'

'And why would that be, please?'

'I have to see Ugo Scoccimarro. He's lending some pictures to our show.'

'All right. And your proposal?'

'I was just thinking that if it would be any help, I'd be glad to dig around a little, to see if I could pick up any rumors in the art world down there.'

He stared at me as if I were crazy. 'You'd be glad. . . !' The rest was choked down with a visible effort. 'Dottore, if you happen to learn of something pertinent, of course I will be happy to hear from you. But I beg of you, don't extend yourself. We have agents in Sicily, skilled undercover agents, who have been gathering information for months. '

'But I could ask questions, get into places that your agents never could. I could—'

'Dottore, we are speaking of an operation of great delicacy, great complexity. There is physical danger, as you well know. The smallest error of judgment could—'

He reached across the width of the automobile to grasp my forearm. Entreaty hadn't been his strong suit so far, but it shone in his eyes now.

'I beg you,' he said. 'Don't meddle. Attend to your business and let us attend to ours.'

Chapter 12

Sure, just leave it to Antuono—who kept telling me that he didn't expect, didn't even intend, to bring anyone to justice. The people behind the thefts—the Mafia, if he was right–would just wind up a few billion lire richer, the insurance company a few billion lire poorer, and that would be the end of it; an inconsequential redistribution of wealth that Assicurazioni Generali was apparently happy to go along with, given the alternative.

Too bad about Max, and about a couple of murders along the way—but you couldn't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, could you?—and all's well that ends well. We would have the paintings; that's the important thing. The paintings would be preserved.

Except of course, that they wouldn't be preserved. Oh, we'd have them, all right —maybe—but you can't hack a stiff, fragile, five-hundred-year-old Giorgione out of its frame, roll it up, and stow it away God knows where, and expect to have quite the same painting when you unroll it two years later. Even that would be hoping for the best. Art thieves have been known to fold canvases (not salutary for aged pigment) or cut them into pieces, or even worse. And what about the future? If people committed theft and murder and got paid for it, weren't you just asking for it again? Was it really 120,000 works of art the carabinieri had recovered, or 1,000— each one stolen 120 times or so?

And these reflections, discouraging as they were, assumed that the paintings would actually be located, that Antuono had matters in hand, as he'd been at such pains to imply. But did he? Then why, with his months of information-gathering, with his 'operation of great delicacy, great complexity,' was he reduced to hoping that Benedetto Croce's crude 'advertisement''—if that was really what it was—worked?

Such were my thoughts as I brooded over a bowl of seafood stew and a plate of stuck-to-each-other-any- which-way Italian rolls. I did have a stake in this, after all, over and above my normal curator's concern for the paintings. My friend had been crippled, and I myself hadn't been handled any too gently. It was only natural that I'd care how things turned out.

And, well, yes, all right, I was a little ticked off—or maybe not such a little—by Antuono's treating me as if I were some bungling do-gooder that kept getting underfoot. Twice now he'd referred to me as a meddler. Why couldn't the guy see I had something to offer? Did he really think his agents with their fake mustaches and sham spectacles could gain the kind of entree into the art world that I could? Or was he just too much of a prima donna to accept help from anyone?

I muttered something along these lines at the last of my zuppa di pesce, ordered an espresso, and tried to get Antuono out of my mind. As he'd said, he had his affairs to worry about; I had mine. Fine, the hell with him. I finished the bitter, bracing coffee in two swallows and headed for my appointment with the dour, orange-haired director of the Pinacoteca.

The Pinacoteca—the word is Greek for picture gallery — was located a few blocks from the Piazza Maggiore, in a well-maintained old building, now painted a mustard yellow, that had once been a Jesuit convent. At the end of Via Zamboni. it was just down the block from the crumbling palazzo that had been the seat of the University of Bologna since 1710, and the small square at the foot of the street was crowded with long- haired, studious-looking youngsters, book bags over their shoulders, engaged in what appeared to be weighty conversations with their peers. There was a fair amount of litter on the pavement, and, except for the Pinacoteca itself, the buildings in the area were showing their age. Peeling plaster, decomposing stucco, and general grunginess were all around, and the walls and columns were covered with tattered posters, most of them notices for concerts or lurid calls to arms. 'Rivoluzione!,' 'Indipendenza!, ' and 'Giustizia!' appeared frequently, as did warlike photographs of Fidel and Che.

It was, in other words, a lot like Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and by the time I stepped onto the Pinacoteca's portico, I was feeling right at home, even a little nostalgic for my graduate years at Cal.

Inside, it was sharply different; no noise, no garbage, no picturesque seediness. All very serene and modem. The cellblock interior of the old convent had been gutted and replaced by spacious, off-white rooms in which the art treasures were expertly shown off against uncluttered settings. I was fifteen minutes early for my meeting with Di Vecchio, so of course I took the time to wander through. I'd been there before, but never with the theft on my mind, and this time I found myself heading for the two rooms from which the paintings had been stolen.

As Di Vecchio had said, there was no 'junk' in the 6,000- piece collection, but most of what the museum did have was work by regional artists who, however good, had never achieved worldwide recognition. These the thieves had left alone; understandably, in my opinion. Would you risk pursuit and prison to steal a Bugardini, a Garofalo ('the Raphael of Ferrara'), a Marco Zoppo?

This is not to say that the Pinacoteca was a second-rate museum. Most of the world's great art museums are equally provincial: the Uffizi, the Prado, the Rijksmuseum—all are primarily showcases for their native sons. It takes a museum without much of a cultural pedigree of its own (the Metropolitan in New York), or with a long history of big spending (London's National Gallery), or with one of the world's preeminent looters in its past (the Louvre), to be truly eclectic. And even the Louvre is a little overrepresented in its Rigauds and Prud'hons, if you ask me.

The thieves had also bypassed the famous paintings in the gallery given to the work of Guido Reni, Bologna's foremost artist. All of these had been created to hang in churches and be seen from a distance, so they were huge, averaging twelve feet by twenty-five. Even when cut from their frames and rolled up, they lacked portability— imagine hurriedly stuffing one in the trunk of a car. The same for a large Raphael in another room.

What had they taken, then? Those paintings small enough to tuck under an arm when cut free and rolled up, that were by artists famous enough to bring real money in Riyadh or Tokyo or Cleveland. The Pinacoteca had lost works by Corregio, Tintoretto, Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, the Carracci, Veronese—eighteen great masterpieces in all.

Well, seventeen. The Botticelli, a Pieta, had been painted in the clumsy, semi- hysterical style of his sadly degraded sixties, thirty years after the glorious days of the Primavera. Definitely Mickey Mouse stuff, to use the appropriate art- historical